Annal:2001 Whitbread Book Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Whitbread Book Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe
- 2001 Whitbread-Biography winner
- Score: 10.51
Piracy and betrayal frame the epic story of solitary endurance that inspired Daniel Defoe’s classic novel.
Who was the real Robinson Crusoe? And what did he really experience during his solitary stay on a remote island in the Pacific? Diana Souhami’s revelatory account of Alexander Selkirk’s adventures on the high seas and dry land leads us to the answers to both these questions, and explores the reality behind the romance of privateering on the high seas.
Born to a poor Scottish family, Selkirk signed on with an ill-fated quest to sack the famous Manila…
- 2001 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.51
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the “golden age” of Dutch culture, the story of one of the world’s most beloved—and most elusive—painters.
In the seventeenth century, industry and commerce thrived in the Dutch city of Delft, as did art and culture. In 1653, the twenty-one-year-old son of an innkeeper, the artist Jan Vermeer, registered as a master painter with the city’s Guild. Vermeer married well, had many children, and enjoyed a respectable local reputation as a painter until his death in 1675. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that his…
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
- 2001 NBCC–Biography winner
- 2001 LATimes–Biography finalist
- 2001 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 22.51
A heroic, brilliantly detailed portrait of the biographer as artist.
James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself was regarded by his contemporaries as a man of no judgment and condemned by posterity as a lecher and a drunk. How could such a fool have written such a book?
Boswell’s “presumptuous task” was his biography of Johnson. Adam Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and his great mentor, one…
Flaubert: A Life
- 2002 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- 2001 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 12.52
A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor’s voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his incomparable novels at a rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall’s remarkable new biography weaves together the inner dramas of Flaubert’s provincial life with the social intrigues of his regular escapes to Paris, where he became a…
